What a Long Strange Trip it Continues to Be!
“To everything, turn, turn, turn,
“There is a season, turn, turn, turn,
“And a time to every purpose under Heaven.” ~ Ecclesiastes
It has been an incredible year! NewWorldView 2.0 celebrates its first anniversary this month. It’s been a year since we opened the new forums, and there are now over 918 subscribers. We averaged over 10,900 unique visitors each month from over 153 countries. The Library continues to add high quality articles on channeling and practical applications of the ideas. The Forums continue to provide a variety of perspectives on the material as well.
Joanne and I will be speaking at the Colorado Seth Conference in Longmont, CO next week. That group, founded by Helen Walker over twenty-five years ago, continues to provide a yearly venue where birds of a feather can come and explore the wonderful work of Jane Roberts, Robert Butts, and The Seth Material. We hope to see many of you there.
As I look back over my blog entries from the last year I see a natural progression of the most significant events in my life over the past twelve months:
- Jo and I attended our first Colorado Seth conference last September, had a great time, and met old and new friends.
- We continued our Dinner & a Dead Guy series with Serge, Mark, and Kris/Brahm in Toronto (now called the International Sessions).
- We said a sad farewell to sweet Anu, who became one of the “patron saints” of the NWV forums.
- I revisited the Rose Colored Glasses topic from the old NWV, because it continues to drive home a crucial series of ideas on how to deal with the downsides of extreme moral relativism.
- We were introduced to Defrene, channeled by Emmy Van Swaaij of the Netherlands, and one of our old-time subscribers from Sethnet and NWV.
- I explored a core conscious creation creed: “I get what I concentrate on,” when I asked for an inner communication “in plain English” and got one!
- I reviewed The Secret and revealed a few secrets that weren’t contained in the book or DVD!
- Jo and I attended the Integral Leadership Conference and met with Ken Wilber and many others near Denver, CO.
- Joanne and I were surprised by a new addition to our family, the essence of Rose, who made Her Presence first known in April.
- We were shocked and awed during our Maui vacation as we got our first deep exposure to the Rose Agenda.
- We traveled to Toronto and attended a “destiny meeting” called The Lotus Mind Workshop where Kris continued to transmit his Avatar Yoga, and achieved a critical mass of interest going forward.
- I finished my Integral Certificate Program, a year-long immersion in a graduate level program taught by Ken Wilber and his Integral Institute in relation to Seth’s vision of a Dream-Art Science.
Otherwise not a lot has been going on! But seriously, as I look back I can see that it has been an incredible year of growth and change for us all.
One story that really stands out was the “Christmas Miracle” provided by Anu after her untimely passing in early December 2006. Recall that we had been having chronic problems last Fall with the NWV database after its September release. People had trouble logging in, and accessing their accounts. I was forced to get a new webhost and move the whole shebang, closing the Forums for over two weeks in December. But I wanted to keep the old database because it contained sweet Anu’s posts, but it just kept crashing on the new webhost as well, even with the best tech support money could buy! Once I gave up, allowed Anu to go, and was willing to sacrifice the old database, something amazing happened. I fired up one final version of the old database just to play around, and it kept working. As of my blog entry from December it had been only five days. As of this writing is has been over eight months! So that is something very special to me, and I continue to thank dear Anu for her loving presence and helpfulness with NWV.
Another story was my Integral Certificate Program. I have not really written that much about it, or posted much to the forums. But I was able to immerse myself in Wilber’s work, with the help of two awesome teachers—Randy Martin and Sean Hargens—and get inside the model to gain more fluency and ease with it. The result is that I wrote two papers that I’m submitting for academic publication in the AQAL Journal. I will let you all know if and when either is accepted. And even if they aren’t, the papers are excellent and a natural continuation of my explorations of Ken’s incredible body of work, and they will be published in the NWV Library.
The first paper is an introduction to key elements of AQAL, which stands for all quadrants, all levels, all lines, all states, and all types—a basic map of human awareness, through five main phases over thirty-five years and twenty-plus books. The idea is to understand the genealogy of Ken’s work to see how these phases all add something important to the overall theory. The second paper, my final project, applied AQAL to the channeling phenomenon. It was an amazing experience to see my classmates begin to appreciate how Ken’s AQAL could be applied to a serious research project on channeling! All I need is five million dollars over five years, seriously, and off we go. I based it on my science museum research experience, so it’s grounded in an experiential context.
Jo and I have agreed that if we ever win the lottery, and we regularly play it, we will set up a foundation and use that paper as the basis for integral research on channeling. And it’s not like we don’t know where to find a bunch of high quality channelers to participate in a five year study!
Speaking of which, the final part of this last year is the new addition to our family—the essence of Rose. It continues to be an incredible learning experience. Joanne and I have decided to take our time and let things develop according to their natural rhythms, which also reminds me of Joanne’s excellent series on Season of the Soul that preceded the Rose phenomenon. Jo is up to session #130, and we continue to get used to Rose’s presence. Rose/Joanne has dictated her first booklet, a short book geared toward teens since there remains a huge gap in what we call Seth 101 and The Seth Material as a whole. So Rose is helping to address the lack of conscious creation basics with her own style and voice, of course, to provide some much needed material for young adults who aren’t getting a transformative spiritual grounding from more conventional churches, synagogues, mosques, or sanghas. It’s very interesting and Jo and I are excited to see this new energy exchange continue to blossom.
Now that I’m finished my Integral Certificate work, I will be posting more on my blog and the NWV forums as well. After the Seth conference, I will also be turning my attention to Rose and helping set up an independent website to properly introduce her and focus on what she has to add to our growing spiritual community. One thing that has struck us both from the beginning, in terms of Rose’s stated purpose and agenda, is that she continues to provide a yoga, or set of practices, geared to help anyone directly experience their own essence, or soul. This is one metric of an authentic energy exchange, and so, I look forward to what this next year brings.
We don’t expect it to all be a bed of roses, LOL!, thinking of Vicki Pendley’s description of the early Elias forum in Castaic when we first moved here almost ten years ago to study and help Elias/Mary. So, the seasons continue to turn, turn, turn, and our long strange trip continues one day at a time. We try our best to stay in the Now, and enjoy the many gifts we are blessed with. We look forward to sharing them with you all!